A World at Arms (176 page)

The United States had been propelled into the war by countries intent on fighting against the power which had made the most elaborate efforts to remove itself from the power plays of the international scene. The war saw the United States change in its attitude toward the world in two closely inter-related ways. On the one hand the dramatic way in which the country was drawn in, the attack on Pearl Harbor, showed the American people in a way nothing else could have that their preference for stopping the world and getting off was simply not a feasible policy line. “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes” may well have been sound advice at a time of limited home industry and resources as well as inaccurate weapons; it made no sense in an era of long-distance planes. Concern over any possible new surprise attack, very much like Soviet concern about any new surprise invasion, dominated thinking about defense policy in post-war America, but perhaps more important was the general recognition by much of the population that an involvement in international affairs was an essential part of any sensible policy. Possible dangers had to be met by policies designed to engage them at a distance, preferably preventing them from becoming dangerous in the first place.

This broad turn in public sentiment was both directed and assisted by a conscious effort on the part of the administration to avoid what were believed to have been errors made in 1918-20 and to anchor the new international policy of the country firmly in both political parties and in the population at large. It was no coincidence that the Roosevelt administration insisted that the preparatory conference for the United Nations Organization, the organizing meeting for it, and its headquarters once it was established, should all be located in the United States.
Although President Roosevelt lived only to see the first one of these three events, he was clearly trying to get the American people to think of the United Nations as something essential to them, not just to others, and to accustom them to a new role in the world. The details of that role were left to his successors, and they were to find the American people even more willing to follow new concepts than Roosevelt himself had thought likely.

If the most conspicuous effect of the war on the United States was its impact on the nation’s position in international affairs, there were also major internal changes. The slow economic recovery from the great depression was very much speeded up by the rearmament and later the war programs of the country. The placing of numerous training facilities and new factories in the south and the west played a major role in rearranging the internal economic and demographic picture of the country. The role of Alaska and Hawaii during hostilities contributed to their subsequent admission as states into the union. New opportunities for women and for Blacks contributed substantially to the development of the later movements for equal rights and opportunities in American society. The 1946 election saw the Republicans regaining control of the Congress after years of Democratic control; but there is surely significance in the fact that while the Republican candidate for President in the wartime 1944 election had promised to replace the female Secretary of Labor with a man, the next Republican President appointed as the first woman to serve in a Republican Cabinet the former head of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC).
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As usual, Blacks had to stand at the end of the line, but in that regard, too, the first efforts at legal procedures to establish fair employment practices during and right after the war pointed in new directions.

Those few countries which had remained neutral throughout the conflict were not, thereby, exempt from the changes of the times. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the process of decolonization. Spain and Portugal held on to their colonial possessions for years, but the dissolution of the Italian, Japanese, British, French, Dutch, Belgian and United States colonial empires was not without effect on those of the two Iberian states. Portuguese Timor had been occupied by the Japanese during conflict; it was seized by the Indonesian state which emerged from the Dutch colonial empire very much the way the Portuguese colony of Goa was seized by newly independent India. In both cases, the local population was by no means happy with its new masters. In the far larger colonial empires of Spain and Portugal in Africa, the tides of independence could not be halted at the borders which the Europeans had arbitrarily imposed on that continent.

The economies of all the neutrals had been very substantially affected by the war as well, and this, and their eventually being drawn into the United Nations Organization, was to make them parts of the world scene from which they had tried so hard to remain aloof.

The military developments of the war left their own special heritage. Enormous quantities of unexploded bombs and shells, like those left over from the battles of the previous world war, killed and maimed people for decades, while some areas had to be kept closed off because of the enormous danger of such explosives. To this danger was now added the effect of radiation from the two atomic bombs and from the various tests and processes associated with their prior and subsequent development. This new type of weapon posed an extraordinary challenge; although the United States made only tiny numbers of them for years and others were barely beginning to do so, here was a truly revolutionary development in warfare.
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Even if the development of science and technology in this field eventually led to weapons which were as much more destructive than the ones used in 1945 as those were compared to the largest conventional bombs of that time, for the vast majority of people the bomb dropped on Hiroshima became the symbol and the standard of measurement for a new era of potentially total destruction. The arms race of the post-war years was dominated not only by this innovation of the war but by its combination with the other most radical departure from the weapons systems of previous wars: the ballistic missile. This weapon, introduced in the form of the A-4 or V-2 by the Germans, pointed the way to the long-range and eventually inter-continental ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead. The possibility of the use of such weapons reinforced the sense of danger to all on the one hand, and the necessity for extreme caution by the major powers on the other.

Other technological developments of the war had equally significant, even if not quite so dramatic, implications for the post-war world. The advance of radar technology had peacetime as well as military applications; without it the growth of international mass transport by scheduled airplanes would be almost inconceivable. The jet airplane, which would have been built anyway but surely considerably later, altered not only the nature of any future war in the air but also the civilian air travel system which benefited from radar. The first computers in the world had been built to assist in the code-breaking activities of the Allies; their successors became ever smaller and simultaneously more powerful and were increasingly utilized for an endless array of civilian purposes. New drugs and medical procedures were applied to peacetime as they had been used in wartime applications.

A host of other advances in weapons, discussed in
Chapter 10
, had contributed to making this the most deadly war ever, and continued development of at least some of them would reinforce their potential impact on any conflict thereafter. In addition, new operational doctrines reshaped the nature of war. The armored thrust on land, first applied by the Germans successfully in the West in May 1940, came to be characteristic of first the Red Army and later the forces of the Western Allies. At sea, also, operational doctrine changed. In part because of the Pearl Harbor attack, the United States navy found itself forced to rely far more heavily than anticipated on aircraft carriers. This was to prove a blessing in extraordinarily effective disguise; the American navy hereafter led the world in the large-scale and effective employment of aircraft carriers, sometimes in great numbers, with the traditional mainstay of all navies, the ship-of-the-line, by this time the battleship, relegated effectively to a subordinate role. When this development is combined with the appearance at the end of the war of the very first true submarines, that is ships which actually remained under water instead of merely being capable of submerging briefly, the basic contours of naval warfare had clearly changed.

Whatever the nature of changes in weapons, the war had certainly not altered the fundamental fact that it was human beings, soldiers and their leaders, who made war. It had been especially difficult for the British and Americans to turn their young men into effective soldiers. The repudiation of war as an enterprise, which had reached major dimensions in both countries, made it extremely hard to remake civilians into warriors capable of coping with the rigors of modern war, and fighting the soldiers of countries which had for decades glorified the profession of arms instead of deprecating it.

The two democracies had operated under two additional handicaps in this endeavor. In the first place, both had to create large citizen armies under officers who were for the most part essentially civilians rather than professional soldiers themselves, and who had to fight armies which had acquired prior experience on the battlefield. Secondly, both had to employ a far higher proportion of their available manpower for skilled positions in the navy, in large air forces, and in the logistical structure required by the need to fight campaigns at enormous distances from home. Such manpower allocations made it far more difficult to develop battle–worthy infantry than it was for the Germans or the Japanese. In spite of these obstacles, the Western Allies were successful, assisted by the massive use of fire–power to support their infantry. As the fighting in North Africa and Italy, Burma and Northern Europe showed, after a difficult start, British and British Indian armies could fight effectively;
from Guadalcanal to Sicily, from Bastogne to Okinawa, the Americans demonstrated the same thing. And as the Germans had found out in the first days of fighting in the East, the Russian soldier could do so too. If the Chinese were ineffective in the last stages of the war, this was due primarily to wretched leadership; they had shown on many earlier occasions that they could be turned into highly effective fighting men.

The human element was critical not only in the ranks but in leadership positions. The type of warfare which characterized World War II called for a kind of military leadership which combined the traditional military virtues of decisiveness, courage, an eye for terrain, a sense of the capabilities of one’s own and the enemy’s forces, and a fair portion of luck with some new qualities which were apparently harder to come by. It was essential for those in command to develop an appreciation for and understanding of the best way to combine different types of weapons: infantry and armor, artillery and airpower. The Germans had some generals who came to be rather good at this, and the Red Army by 1942 had a substantial number who came to be superb at it, especially the combining of high quality armor and massed artillery with an infantry that could not be kept to a very high standard because of earlier huge losses.

The Japanese made up with determination what their leadership frequently lacked in skill; it was only in the final stages of the war that they began to realize that suicide charges by officers wielding sabres and men carrying bayonets were not nearly as effective as a carefully drawn out holding operation from cover. With few exceptions, their handling of combined arms operations did not measure up to the standards of other armies, and their naval commanders, however technically skilled and brave, all too often succumbed to Yamamoto’s penchant for extremely complicated plans which were then at times abandoned prematurely. Perhaps more than any other belligerent, they had been hampered by an almost total failure of coordination between army and navy; all armed forces had inter-service rivalries to spare, but the Japanese carried the practice to extraordinary length. They also appear to have been handicapped by the periodic deliberate misleading of higher headquarters by fabricated reports of victories; there is, for example, no known parallel to the imaginary destruction of Admiral Halsey’s naval force in the Formosa air battle of 1944 with the resulting complete misleading of Japanese headquarters.
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Although a good case can be made for the British military leaders having been extraordinarily slow learners, they did learn. In the latter stages of the war, British forces were increasingly commanded by men
of great ability and effectiveness. The same thing proved true of the Americans, who fortunately learned very much more quickly. Like all armed forces, the American ones had to relieve generals and admirals on occasion, and such actions generally led to considerable recriminations afterwards, but this was hardly a new development in war. What was new was that the war called for still further qualities in the highest levels of command, qualities that proved scarce.

In a global war of great complexity, personal relationships at the top were of even greater importance than usual; and, in addition, at least a few of the highest commanders had to acquire the ability to work with allies and to understand global relationships.

In all the forces, able commanders developed, if they did not already have, the skills needed to inspire and work with others.
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Some, like German Field Marshal von Kesselring, were particularly abrasive; some like Field Marshal Montgomery, General Patton, and General MacArthur, were essentially egomaniacs; some had more pleasant qualities matched with firmness that made them especially good leaders: Admiral Nimitz, Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, Krueger, and Eichelberger; some inspired respect by the obvious force of their personalities and intellect: Field Marshal Brooke and General Slim, to mention two examples. What was most obviously lacking among both German and Japanese leaders were the two other qualities which the war called for: an ability to work with allies and a broad, global perspective.